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Introducing our good friend, Joe Lauria.
He's out of Erbil, Kurdistan, in Iraqi Kurdistan now.
Right, Joe?
Still there?
That's correct.
Yes, I am.
And, boy, I'm going to ask you about that here in a minute.
But first, we've got to talk about Joe's new book, How I Lost, by Hillary Clinton.
And it's with a foreword by Julian Assange, introduced and annotated by Joe Lauria.
The book is actually just block quotes of Her Highness, and it's really something else.
I will plead guilty.
I only read about half of it, because then I came down with a chicken pox, and I'm trying to heal thyself here, and reading Hillary Clinton's statements, there's no way to get better.
Although, laughing at her, you know, this is some funny stuff.
First of all, Joe, welcome back to the show.
Good to talk to you again, my friend.
How'd you come up with this idea to write a book for Hillary Clinton like this?
Well, it's funny, you know, that title, How I Lost, by Hillary Clinton, has caused lots of confusion.
There are lots of people who think she actually wrote it.
Of course, she did.
She was using her own words to crucify herself.
She explains why she lost, not what she's been saying out on the circuit, blaming everybody else.
The book idea started before the election.
The publisher, Orr Books, one of the partners, Colin Robinson, he's the R in Orr, O-R Books, had already published two of Julian Assange's works before, and made- You know what, I should introduce you a little better for the audience, too, so that they know that you're some sort, I don't want to pigeonhole you or anything, but you're some sort of progressive type leftist.
No sort of Republican or conservative or libertarian type.
You're firmly on the left half of the spectrum, covered the United Nations for many years as a reporter, of course, but this is not a right-wing hatred of Hillary Clinton.
That's absolutely correct.
You're attacking the left from the left here.
That's relevant.
Well, I don't consider her left, but you might.
Yes.
She's definitely a left-wing attack on her, which confuses a lot of people, because they don't understand that that exists.
There have been a lot of people on the right who applauded this book right away.
For example, Ann Coulter retweeted the WikiLeaks tweet, WikiLeaks put out a tweet announcing this book.
She retweeted that and put it on her Facebook page.
We also got Erica John, for some reason, she was excited about the book and tweeted about it.
Which by the way, I mean, I should say, I mean, I'm a libertarian.
I'm not any kind of right-winger, never have been.
But on the other hand, I don't think you have to be a left-winger to see her Goldman Sachs speeches for what they are or something like that.
You could come from any place on the spectrum.
I think the real problem with her is she is the center.
Maybe she's the plumb line and therefore, maybe that's why she is everything that's wrong with American politics, Joe, maybe?
Maybe.
She's the extreme center.
I think that Tariq Ali came up with that phrase, if I'm not mistaken.
So even though I worked for the Wall Street Journal for six and a half years, covering the UN for them and the Boston Globe before that and the Sunday Times, another Murdoch paper, I am left progressive, as you say, and that's the position in which we are critiquing.
Her words and her campaign aides, their emails, of course, form an important part of the book.
The idea for the book came about before the election, that Assange and Colin Robinson of OR were going to publish in book form the most important emails that WikiLeaks had leaked from both the DNC and from the John Podesta email.
And one thing led to another, and it dragged on beyond the election, and I was asked to come in and basically save the project.
And I agreed.
I'm already in the midst of writing another book for OR, OR Books, but they asked me to put that aside and to write the commentary.
And it turned out to be more than I'd expected.
I wrote quite a lot, about 20,000 words.
And I create also, I'm not just commenting on her words and on her aides' words in the emails and in her speeches.
I'm trying to create the context, the political context, to understand her policies, domestic and particularly foreign.
And this is, a lot of that is reporting that never appeared in corporate media because in my view has been suppressed from my experience, has been suppressed.
There have been numerous stories that I tried to pitch when I was working for big media and it was rejected.
And without that information, I'm talking specifically about Ukraine and Syria.
Without that information, you don't, you get a very skewed idea of what's happening in both of those places.
And Hillary Clinton, of course, took very hawkish views on both Syria and Ukraine and Libya in which the last chapter of the last section of the book is all on Libya.
She was the driving force there.
Hillary Clinton is a hawk and she is an economic elitist.
These are the two reasons that I give, those are the two parts of the book, for why she lost.
And I'm arguing that it's her policies that led to her defeat, her humiliating defeat.
Someone she should have beaten, everyone thought she would.
Not her tactics, her campaign tactics, sure.
Some of them were very bad, like not campaigning in the Rust Belt states, not going once to Wisconsin after the convention.
But she needed to go there to offset the policies that were rejected by people there and elsewhere in the country.
Now, there's that other book that came out that's got on the bestseller list and it's an inside baseball book about the campaign, written by campaign reporters in that bubble.
And it's all about tactics and infighting as if this is the first campaign where there was hatred and jealousy and backstabbing going on there.
They're all pretty much like that.
So you know, that's a good gossipy book and it's fun and all that.
But I think it ignores the fact that it was her policies that led to her defeat.
And that's what I'm trying to argue in this book.
It's trying to show.
You know, I think the policies and the strategy of the campaign really have a lot to do with each other, too.
I mean, the fact that as they talk about that other book you're talking about, I think I've heard reference to Bill Clinton saying, you know who they called him Bubba, right?
That was his whole thing.
He was the guy who would go and tell white working class people that, hey, these country club Republicans, these Republicans don't care about you.
You know that.
Come on.
That was how he got elected.
And he said, you got to send me to do that.
And they said, no, we don't need white men.
Well, white people are 60 percent of the population of the country.
What do you mean you don't need white men?
You know, but their attitude, you know, it carried over into their policy.
In fact, even just the slogan, I'm with her rather than she's for us.
Right.
Or even all of her campaign ads.
Donald Trump says mean things that hurt the feelings of young fat girls.
Well, OK, but we already know that.
But meanwhile, like I remember watching in, I don't know, September or October, watching the same campaign ad that has Donald Trump being mean to fat girls.
And it's like, dude, I saw this ad for the first time four or five months ago.
You don't have a single ad that says, I'm Hillary Clinton and here's why people like me.
I mean, obviously, you're going to have to lie, but still, you got millions of dollars.
Pay somebody to pretend to like you for some reason.
And it didn't even occur to them that they needed to even run her as someone who cared about other people who wanted to help other people, as that other campaign book says it.
They couldn't actually come up with an answer to the question why she was running.
They couldn't even fake it because she loves you and she wants to help you.
How hard is that?
They couldn't even fake that.
And the answer was because she was born to be president.
You owe her.
And it's you know, it's our job to basically, you know, be like a bunch of ants and make a bridge for her to walk to power.
That's our only role.
That's how she saw the American people.
And that's exactly how she played it.
And she didn't even have someone to tell her that, hey, this whole I'm going to arrogantly stroll right into power thing is actually not really working very well.
You know, anybody on her staff who might have pointed that out was long since gone, maybe had never been hired in the first place.
So you know, it is all one big package.
It's her arrogance that the imperial hubris of Hillary Clinton is the same thing that ruined Libya, the same thing that ruined her campaign.
I can't disagree.
I think there was an enormous sense of entitlement there that she deserved it.
She reowed it to her, that kind of thing.
I agree with that.
Also, Bill Clinton, you mentioned him when he said, you know, country club Republicans don't care about you.
That's true.
But what he didn't tell you was he didn't care about them either.
And we saw that.
The Clinton administration and Hillary both working against the interests of the working class and decoupling labor unions and workers from the Democratic Party is traditional base.
And they destroyed that systematically in the 1990s during the Clinton administration.
And with all of their neoliberal centrist policies and Hillary, it was more of the same.
She even talked about getting rid of Social Security or privatizing it rather.
So she was open to this.
And you see in all of her Wall Street speeches who she's on, whose side she's on.
She's on the side of Wall Street, not on average Americans.
And they sent her packing.
And the other thing is about her, her ads.
You mentioned her ads.
You know, there was a study that said like 70 percent of her ads were about Donald Trump.
And 30 percent were about policy, where his was about 70 percent about policy, whether you agree with it or not.
So that was the lowest in like four election cycles of anyone that she did not talk about.
Well, and even his ads were like, vote Trump.
He's tall and likes flags and cares about America.
And her ads were like, Donald Trump makes me feel bad.
I mean, she's.
Yeah.
So Trump cleverly played to the interests of working class people, not just white working class people, but he had a class message about jobs being shipped overseas, about the lack of infrastructure in the country and the and regime change war.
He was going to stop all the all three of which impact working people more than anyone else.
And if you look at his performance so far, he's gone back on a lot of those things.
Yeah.
But point is, how he won was by saying she's trigger happy Hillary.
I'm going to.
Yeah.
He had the right.
I mean, he had a similar message to Bernie Sanders.
We don't know what Sanders would have done had he been elected, but we've seen what Trump is doing.
He had I don't know who was telling him to say this, whether it was Steve Bannon, whether he was it was his own idea.
You know, he said to Larry King once Donald Trump did several years ago that rich people don't like me.
It's the taxi drivers and all.
So he's from Queens, New York.
He's a he's a working class kind of guy and his speech and his manners, mannerisms that played well.
And he said the right things to them.
But we see now that he put Goldman Sachs people in his administration and he his health insurance plan would not help people who voted for him, who elected him and his budget.
And he got applauded the only time I got applauded when he hit Syria directly, which Obama didn't do.
So he's hit the Syrian regime three times now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's right.
That's right.
Anyway, back to the horror show, which is Hillary Clinton and her campaign and this great book.
I mean, it's really great.
I really do hope you'll read it.
The annotations are great.
It's put together exactly how you would have it.
And and then the block quotes.
It's just amazing.
It's a book of block quotes of Hillary Clinton explaining exactly why we all didn't support her.
And, you know, this is the big for all the crying about Russia and this and that and everything.
But the liberals addressed just how many Obama voters stayed home.
They just couldn't be cattle prodded into going outside to support this lady.
And those non-voters, you know, by far are the people who did vote for Obama and did not vote for her was by far wide enough margin to have covered her loss if she had been able to get them out.
But she wasn't able to get them out.
And a big part of that, of course, is just the overall attitude, as we talked about.
But as revealed in these speeches now, help me out here, because in the campaign, Joe, in the primaries, Bernie Sanders kept saying, hey, let's see those speeches.
And she kept saying, yeah, I'll release my speeches when Donald Trump releases his tax returns as though that was going to be a satisfactory answer for Democratic primary voters, you know.
But then she got away with it until what?
Was it July or August that then the Podesta emails were finally leaked and the speeches were revealed?
And then so what was so bad about it?
Because I think actually, you know, at that point it was already the general and the media was 100 percent in the bag for her and against Trump.
They turned on a dime.
That Pied Piper strategy worked.
They got him the nomination.
You could talk about that if you want.
They got him the nomination.
Then they turned on a dime.
You know, all hands on deck.
Everybody, you know, fire on Trump and the speeches.
If anything, they said, oh, boo hoo, the Russians leaked the speeches.
And that was the that was the news story.
But you reprint the transcripts of these things and they really are pretty incredible, huh?
Yes.
You know, the day after the by the way, the Podesta emails were leaked, she changed her position on TPP.
She went on the PBS NewsHour.
So she saw immediately the impact that these would have.
And she was being revealed as the hawkish elitist, economic elitist that she is.
And she couldn't hide that anymore.
Even the New York Times, by the way, turned on her and demanded that she released the speeches from Goldman Sachs and that her excuse that everybody makes these speeches wasn't good enough.
So I think there's any doubt that what WikiLeaks did by publishing these emails heard her.
In many ways, it only confirmed what people are suspected about her, which was that she was this hawk and this elitist.
But now we have the facts and the details.
And there was a reason why she didn't want to release those speeches, obviously, because she knew that how she would appear in an anti-establishment year for both parties.
This was the quintessential insider, the establishment candidate Hillary Clinton, which a Democratic party should have understood.
But I argue that I think they would rather have lost to Trump with Hillary than to have Bernie become the candidate, because he could be threatening to their interests as well, this Democratic elite, if you follow through on the things that he was talking about.
So there's a lot in there, of course, as we know from the emails about how they tried to hurt Bernie in his quest to get the nomination.
That's all revealed.
And you know, Russia is, we have to talk about Russia at some point here, because Russia is still the issue, as we saw just now with this latest Senate Intelligence Committee hearings with Jeff Sessions, that Russia has become a mania of the liberals.
And it is a new McCarthyism.
And even if Russia did have something to do with giving these emails to WikiLeaks, which Julian Assange denies this, he says it did not come from Russia.
Even if it did, the emails are true, they're factual, and they gave the voter information about Hillary Clinton.
It was a service to the voters of the United States.
Trump, by the way, he was an open book.
We knew everything scandalous about him, pretty much.
And he won anyway.
So it wasn't like, you know, we didn't know anything about any dirt on Trump.
But we got this dirt unfairly from WikiLeaks on Hillary Clinton.
And do you also, do your listeners really think that if Julian Assange got Republican emails that would have revealed more dirt maybe on the party and on Trump, that he would not have published them?
Of course he would have.
And should he have withheld the DNC and the Podesta emails because he didn't have the RNC?
Now that's, you can't suppress that.
So he was opposed to both candidates, as I was.
He was opposed to both.
So he was not going to withhold the DNC and Podesta emails.
And you're right, though, that every one of us knows who Donald Trump is.
I mean, I can't remember.
I've said this on the show before.
Sorry, I'm repeating myself.
I can't remember a time that I didn't know who Donald Trump was.
I probably saw Donald Trump on Robin Leach's Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous in 1983 or something.
And he's exactly the same person this whole time.
Remember when he went bankrupt in the early 90s and everybody laughed at him because here was the most arrogant 80s yuppie, had crashed and burned and this and that.
The only thing new that I learned about him, Joe, in this campaign was that his show The Apprentice had been on for 14 years.
I had no idea.
And when I found that out, I said, oh, he's going to win.
There's just zero.
I mean, Jeb would have stomped Hillary into the ground.
She's the worst person on earth.
But he was on.
He had that TV show for 14 years.
That's the only thing I learned new about Donald Trump.
And that was enough to know that he was deeply into the psyche of every single American human you got, with no exceptions.
I mean, he's he's a level of fame far beyond Hillary Clinton, and she's the most famous woman in the world.
No doubt about it.
But he's got a level of familiarity in your household that she could just never top.
You know, he's such a.
And for good or for ill, everything that you know about him, you know, in terms of how shallow he is and what a blowhard he is and and how mean he can be and and everything else that you might like about him, too, you know, whatever.
All of it.
Absolute open book.
And now.
But here's the thing that I never hear liberals or Democrats, Hillary Clinton supporters confront at all, which I don't know how they would.
The question of why the leaking of Podesta's e-mails and the DCC e-mails and it's set and the rest and the rest of them, her e-mails, the ones the State Department was releasing and the ones that Jason Leopold got through FOIA and the whole all the different collections there, Russian or otherwise.
Why didn't the leaking and publishing of all those e-mails help Hillary Clinton?
Why didn't they show her to be the great leader that they want us to believe that she is?
Why didn't it show her, you know, tamping down on whatever kind of negative things that her campaign people wanted to do and telling them, no, we're we're going to run a tight ship here and do the right thing, because that's how winners win.
And we didn't see that.
Right.
What we saw was a bunch of secret speeches to Goldman Sachs.
What we saw was a bunch of secret conspiracies that let's get our friends at CNN to play up Donald Trump because he'll be the easiest to beat.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The media collusion was another big thing that we learned from these e-mails.
Oh, yeah.
Donna Brazile cheating in the in the debates.
You know, I still see her on Twitter going, oh, Russia this and Russia that.
I know.
I know.
You personally got caught cheating.
That's got to be worth four points or I don't know, three something.
I mean, that's pretty big, right?
Cheating in a debate and caught red handed.
Yeah, it's amazing.
And the New York Times reporters who wanted to show their articles to the campaign before it was published to get it okayed.
I mean, this is a fireball offense at a news organization, at least when I started in journalism.
But you know, these, as I say in the book, these reporters today covering the campaigns were not they are living off the reputation of the New York Times and the Washington Post from the 1970s.
These are not the same papers anymore.
And we see it as the way they are just accepting whatever some intelligence source tells them about Russia having something to do with this campaign.
They're just reporting it without any skepticism whatsoever.
And after in the 70s, after the church committee and all those revelations, there was a wholly different attitude towards the intelligence community, towards the FBI and the CIA, etc.
You wouldn't buy what they were saying.
You knew that their job was deception, disinformation and deceit.
And they would not get their stories published just like that.
You'd have to vet what they say.
But now we're seeing, and interestingly enough, James Comey in his testimony the other day revealed that one New York Times story on February 14th, which talked again, quoted unnamed sources saying that there was a vast collusion between campaign members of Trump's team and Russians.
He said it was all a lie.
It was all false.
And it's not that the New York Times knowingly published lies, it's they are gullibly listening to whatever these intelligence sources tell them, because it fits their agenda.
Their agenda is to get rid of Trump.
And if he does, if he's committed a crime, he should be gotten rid of.
We've seen no evidence of any of this collusion.
Comey revealed, by the way, the other day that he said this investigation should go on because if it catches anybody in his campaign, he'd want that to happen.
That doesn't sound like obstruction of justice to me.
He also said, and interestingly, that Trump, and this is Comey's words, Trump felt that this Russia obsession was making it hard for him to govern, that it grabbed oxygen from public discourse, that he wanted to get rid of this.
Maybe that's why he wanted to.
He told Comey that he hoped that he would, you know, drop this thing, at least with Flynn.
So, you know, I don't know what happened between Russia and Wikileaks and Russia and campaign Trump.
I don't know the results, but I'm not jumping on board, claiming people are guilty the way the mainstream media has done, the way the liberals have done.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, this is the whole thing.
I mean, it really is a matter of simple trutherism versus journalism.
It's a matter of inductive versus deductive thinking and logic here.
So if you beg the question in the proper sense of that term, if you assume your conclusion that everybody knows that Putin and the GRU were responsible for this, that and the other thing, and once you already know that first, then, oh, my God, can you believe that Sessions is sitting here saying, I don't recall exactly how many times he met with the guy?
And can you believe whatever it is, the way that they spin everything?
And yet, if you don't assume your conclusion and you look at it, even just pretend like, what if you really, really do believe that?
Okay, still, just pretend and be objective for one second and look at it from the point of view of Trump, that all of this is BS, that he knows it's BS, and that what he told the director of the NSA and the DNI was, hey, since you guys know this is BS, can you please tell the media that or something?
And then they said, no, well, actually, sir, since there's an investigation, that wouldn't be proper for his comment.
And he went, oh, okay.
And then he told the head of the FBI, look, because I know that you know that you told me and I told everyone and everybody knows the thing that I'm not under investigation, would you please tell them I'm not under investigation?
People want to say that's obstruction of justice, as though he's thwarting this thing because they are already presuming the truth of it all.
When if you look at it from the point of view of him, of this actually being a giant pile of nonsense, which it clearly is, then it makes perfect sense that he would just be complaining that, geez, aren't I supposed to get a chance to be president here before you guys run me out of town on a rail, on some bogus trees in charge?
This is crazy.
It's completely out of control.
And it's a bunch of nonsense.
You look at the actual intelligence report they put forward and there's no intelligence in it at all.
It simply says some handpicked chosen CIA, FBI and I guess DNI office members agreed on this and the NSA expressed moderate confidence.
And by the way, let us spend now the second half or maybe the the second and third thirds of the report complaining about RT having an anti-American spin, such as for an example, a TV show they did three years ago about fracking or occupiers.
In fact, that report about RT was from 2012 that they just copied and pasted on there to try to make the thing look like it was more than a few pages long.
They've actually provided no evidence.
And I've interviewed Jeffrey Carr, the computer expert who says that you can sit here and say APT 28 equals GRU all day long, but they've never proven it.
They can't prove it.
Yeah, well, that's where we're at here.
And meanwhile, I mean, on my Twitter feed, I'm sure it's the same as yours.
Every center left liberal journalist in America, they are so it's like Michael Ledeen and the AEI boys in 2002 talking about Saddam Hussein.
It's all just a big, you know, back padding, self-referential echo chamber type consensus building operation or something.
It's like a social psychology experiment.
It has nothing to do with any facts at all.
Any journalism at all.
Well, we're still waiting for that.
You know, we're that's why we need a real investigation, Joe, because it's the summer and we still don't have any evidence.
Yeah, no, I can't agree with you more about the description of liberal media right now.
This is totally herd mentality or groupthink, and they are reinforcing each other without any real facts about this story.
And that NIE, that was not an NIE, what you're discussing there.
That was an assessment opinion, as you say, handpicked people.
And it was not 17 agencies, as Hillary Clinton still says, even though she knows better.
It was three, and they didn't come to a solid conclusion about anything.
And there's no facts or evidence to back it up.
It's only, but, you know, they tried to sell that to the American people.
And with the media buying it, they are selling it to too many people, unfortunately.
It's all part of this new McCarthyism, Scott, that is very, very funny.
It is a completely new McCarthyism, and it is a new Cold War.
It's not like a Cold War, or maybe it is.
It is a Cold War.
And this is McCarthyism.
And you look at the only facts or evidence, and Comey again said that they never looked at the DNC server.
They got this from CrowdStrike.
CrowdStrike, private company.
It was founded by a guy who was a member of the Atlantic Council.
He's a Ukrainian.
He's anti-Russian Atlantic Council.
They said that this was Russia that did it.
They also said that they left behind, that the clues were that they left behind Cyrillic text and the name of the first Soviet police chief, secret police chief.
But that's supposed to be a sophisticated state operation with those kinds of clues?
And now Voice of America, I don't know if you know this, Voice of America did a couple of articles, of all people, Voice of America, that got completely ignored, saying that CrowdStrike had used the same program, the same method to discover that Russia had hacked Ukraine's howitzers on the battlefield in eastern Ukraine.
And guess what?
The Ukrainian army denied this.
It's not true.
And they had to admit it wasn't true.
So their crack system of finding out that Russia hacked into the DNC is the same one they used that Russia hacked into the howitzers, and that's been discredited.
So that CrowdStrike, the whole thing about the proof of Russia, at this point anyway, does not exist.
But it doesn't matter for the liberal media, it doesn't matter.
They're pushing that forward anyway.
Well, in a way it's hilarious, right?
Because...
Frightening, too.
Frightening.
I like to point and laugh at sore losers.
I mean, when Hillary keeps coming forward and giving these speeches about how it's not my fault, it's not my fault, I mean, they say that she accepted responsibility.
But the only time that you can show me that anyone could show that that happened was when Christiane Amanpour basically forced the words into her mouth and said, well, you do accept some responsibility.
That was the question.
She said, well, yes, of course.
And then she went on to say why she does not accept responsibility.
Why it's all Russia's fault and all Comey's fault and all everybody's fault, except for the people who didn't vote for her.
She doesn't blame them because they don't have anything to do with it, right?
In her conception, it's not up to the American people to choose.
Whether her game was good enough to make them choose her or not, and she's convinced it was and yet it got stolen away from her anyway.
And I think it's hilarious because what it means to me is she's just miserable all day every day.
She can't come to terms with, OK, well, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and I guess you'll never be president.
But you know, Al Gore didn't kill himself, man.
He's doing all right.
What's he going to do?
John Kerry lost.
Life goes on.
But no, for her, life doesn't go on.
She's stuck with this and it's driving her mad.
And that is, to me, just wonderful.
Like I just her misery just tastes so good to me.
And yet, though, there's a problem, which is that this consensus about Russia is there's all kinds of blowback and consequences that are going to come from this for having the entire kind of left half of the American political spectrum so wrapped up in what they've convinced themselves, allowed themselves to be convinced about Russia and its role in the world and America's role in containing their aggression and all that they've done to subvert our democracy and all these kinds of things.
And I really don't know.
It's almost it feels like when they pass the Iraq Liberation Act or something like, oh, boy, you know, we're only kind of just getting started.
But there's another shoe going to drop over this.
Yeah, it's chillingly scary situation to be provoking and blaming a nuclear power, you know, where we where there's tension on the Baltics and in Eastern Europe with NATO troops, 30,000 or more up against the border.
You've got in Ukraine, the thing is on, you know, hair trigger.
And then Syria, where the plane, both American and Russian planes are flying together.
So to be pushing this Russia thing in this circumstance is just abominable and totally irresponsible and purely for partisan reasons.
And this is what is so disturbing about it, that you're right.
She actually said at that code conference, the last time she blamed everybody else, she said, I take responsibility, but that's not why I lost.
I mean, that was a direct quote.
So then she went on to blame everyone else, as you said.
I think she needs to read the why I lost by Hillary Clinton to find out why she lost, how she lost, because it's all there.
She's explained herself why she lost.
Somebody just had to point it out and frame it.
That's all I've done here and give the political background to the conflicts in Syria and Ukraine and in Libya to show why she was had the wrong headed policy and she was the wrong candidate and that the voters were not that dumb.
They figured this out, that she was not selling anything that they wanted to buy and she was not appealing to their interests, but to her and her class, Wall Street, and others in that class, the 1%.
That's who she represents.
She's the failure of the left, Scott, Hillary Clinton, the Clintons.
They destroyed the Democratic Party by cutting it or by making it a party of elitists and professionals and having this absolute snarbring of status.
If you recall in the 60s, the counterculture, one of the things about that was to put down what the 1950s emphasis on status, social status, how far you went in the company, how big your house was, how green your lawn was, how big your car.
The 60s counterculture completely confronted that and rejected that and it's back with a vengeance.
I think it's worse probably than it was in the 1950s.
The idea of who you are in this system right now is everything, whether you get that blue check next to your name on Twitter and, you know, you are a real journalist or you're a fake one.
So this kind of mentality, this is Hillary Clinton's elitist professional supporters who look down on working people and dismiss them and this came through in her speeches, in her policies, and it came through on November 8th.
That's why she's not president.
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Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, it's funny, isn't it, how just there's no self-awareness there at all, where you could see how if we're talking about some Senate race somewhere where you had a Hillary Clinton-esque Democrat lose to a Tea Party guy, you would go, okay, well, you know what, the way it usually works is the more moderate force wins in the general election, but not always.
Sometimes the winger ends up getting the nomination and then really has the support and the momentum to carry through all the way through the general election.
That's part of American politics.
That happens sometimes.
But whether it's more of a left winger gets the Democratic nomination or more of a right winger gets the Republican nomination, it usually doesn't happen in the presidential season.
You know, Goldwater ended up, he was the winger and he ended up getting completely stomped.
But then again, Reagan was the winger and he did the stomping twice, right?
So you know, these things, not that he was, well, he was as much of a, turns out, centrist as Trump.
Don't get me wrong.
I just mean in terms of messaging and campaigning and the politics of the moment.
And yet she can't even, her and her people can't really say, okay, well, you know, maybe more of a winger might've done better this time, or maybe it was just a year for a right winger and a center leftist who's, you know, known as a relatively competent manager or something actually just wasn't the right shtick, I mean, for this season, right?
And she used to say herself that back before it would have sounded like taking responsibility that, well, I'm really not that good of a politician, meaning she has no common touch because we can feel the contempt that she has for us.
And we reflect that contempt onto her.
And so, you know what I mean?
Like what, why is that so hard to say that like, you know what, for all his flaws, Donald Trump gives a good handshake and people like that, you know?
Well, if you look at how well Jeremy Corbyn did in the general election in Britain, and how poorly Hillary Clinton did by losing, you'd have to hope that maybe we're nearing the end of this neoliberal era that was ushered in by Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s, and that the Clinton Democratic Party and the Blair Labor Party moved towards, they moved towards the center, they accepted the neoliberalism, they destroyed the unionism and hurt working class people with their trade deals and their deregulation and their privatizations.
And now maybe we're moving to the end of that.
And we saw Corbyn doing well, Bernie doing well, much better than people thought.
Unfortunately, the left being destroyed by Clinton in the US, it's been taken over, in my view, this anger, this popular anger about being screwed by Wall Street and by the 1% is being absorbed by right-wing populism.
Trump in the US, Marine Le Pen in France, and it's because of the failure of the left that this has happened, in my opinion.
But the fact is, the people are awake, it seems like, and the traditional politicians have been pushing this same neoliberal line now for 30 more years.
Maybe it's the end of the road, and they're going to have to adjust somehow, and it looks like the Democratic Party has not adjusted, more of the same.
They are just blind to what's going on out there.
They think they're really hot crap, you know?
They are it.
They are the leaders.
They are the ones who've made the money.
They've made it in the, they've got the status, as I was saying before, and screw these people.
But the people are waking up.
Yeah, everybody else are deplorable, they say.
You know?
The deplorables.
Yeah, people not even good enough to pander to.
And now, so here's what's funny, too, though, is, I mean, I think you and I disagree a bit about what exactly is wrong with the economy, although I don't think we disagree as to who's responsible, it's just which parts of their policies I would emphasize versus the ones that you would emphasize.
But I think that either way, I think that there's, you know, never mind libertarians like me, our opinions hardly count at all.
But I think that there's, it's always very contradictory to me, honestly.
The way I look at it is, the further left you go, the more principled you are, for good or for ill, mostly for good, because the further left you go, the more committed to opposing war you are.
And that's what's most important to me, of course.
That's the biggest issue of all.
The biggest big government program of all is the Pentagon and its world empire.
And leftists, I can count on to be anti-imperialism, whereas a Democrat, you know, the more that leftist agrees with my economics, the worse they become on virtually everything else and support, you know, all kinds of government horror shows of social engineering, drug wars and regime changes and world bank loans to exploit and destroy third world countries in economic hitman fashion and all those kinds of things.
So I mean, at this point, I certainly, I prefer to run around with communists than a liberal who agrees with me on property rights at all at this point because of the wars, because of the empire.
So I'm thrilled to see Jeremy Corbyn win in England, even though I'm sure his economic policies, to whatever degree he gets away with them, will ultimately be to the detriment of the country.
I really don't care about England.
I care about that England is no longer part of the American empire.
If he can throw any kind of wrench into the UK, helping America with our wars, and that's all I care about is stopping the slaughter of the Libyans and the Iraqis and the Syrians and the Afghans and to hell with America and England.
You know what I mean?
Same thing here.
I would have far preferred to see Bernie Sanders completely break the dollar as long as that broke the empire.
You know, though, I care if he spends all the money given it to poor people instead of giving it all the Lockheed and giving it all the Wall Street, you know, that's more libertarian to support the communist.
If you ask me, well, Hillary Clinton was all for empire, of course, even after General Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified Senate Armed Services Committee that a no fly zone in Syria would mean going to war with Russia and Syria.
She went on the debate stage a couple of weeks later with Trump and said she still supported the no fly zone in Syria.
She called Vladimir Putin Hitler.
Every time an American leader calls another foreign leader Hitler, there's usually a war after that.
Noriega was Hitler, Panama was invaded, Milosevic was Hitler, Serbia was bombed.
Now we see Putin being Hitler.
What did she have in mind there?
You know, the whole Ukraine thing, I point out in the book, you know, that was never reported very widely, or if at all, in the Western media.
The German intelligence service said that General Breedlove, the head of NATO, was totally lying about 40,000 troops, Russian troops, on the Ukraine border, or about to invade or that they'd already invaded.
It was all a hoax about the Russian invasion.
And it was a Western country, Germany, that said this, German intelligence, in Der Spiegel.
And we had John Kerry talking in an elite conversation with exiled leaders from Syria that the United States was willing to let ISIS move towards Damascus if it could get Assad, Bashar al-Assad, to leave, risking a takeover in Damascus.
And he says that's why Russia intervened, not for their imperial glory in the Middle East, as Hillary Clinton and others say, because they didn't want ISIS to take over in Damascus.
Now I think that's a pretty good policy, don't you?
So Hillary Clinton would have been, you know, the night before, an hour before Trump sent those cruise missiles to that Syrian airfield, Hillary was on a stage saying we should attack their airfields, plural.
So we can never say, now whatever disaster Trump brings us, and he might in foreign policy, we haven't seen, hopefully we won't see some big disaster.
But if we do, you can't say, well Hillary Clinton wouldn't have done that.
We don't know what she would have done.
It's impossible to say.
But based on what her positions were, as outlined in the book, and in her own speeches, and in the emails that we now know, she would have been a very dangerous leader, and I think this is why Russia, from Russia's point of view, which doesn't count, of course, we only get the American point of view in the American press, but from Russia's point of view, she was a great danger.
So the idea that they may have helped Trump would not surprise me, but there's no evidence of that yet, going back to what we were saying.
I mean, I have to say, even up until the point that we have, you know, H-bomb ICBMs headed this way, I still think even then, I would say, well, Hillary would have gotten us killed six months ago.
I mean, literally, even if Donald Trump got us into a nuclear war, I think she would have first...
Well, you know, they're going to say, they're going to say Hillary wouldn't have done this.
I don't buy that.
I mean, here's, this is the special thing I think about Hillary, and I read quite a bit of the, she's a hawk section of your book, and it's really good, but I'm not sure if you really kind of, or if the speeches really highlight this point, but it's something that I think I've learned about her over the years from different reports here and there about, you know, in her psychology, I think the most important thing always is pleasing the toughest guy in the room and being seen as man enough to be part of the group of the tough guys.
Because after all, yeah, we're talking about the National Security Services in a big way, and they're very macho dudes, and she's trying very hard to fit in, and after all, she's just a president's wife, right?
So when she ran for Senate, as soon as she became a senator, the first thing she did was join the Armed Services Committee, you know?
Not even the Foreign Relations Committee, the Armed Services Committee.
She went straight for that national security credential for her eventual run for president way back then.
It was pretty obvious what she was doing.
And then there's the stories of, she meets with Jack Keane, and so she kicks her shoes off and puts them up on his desk and says, where can a gal get a beer around here, General?
And this kind of thing.
And then you have all the reporting from when Petraeus and Gates and everybody forced Obama to do the surge.
He turns to her, and she says, oh, I think you got to do whatever the generals say, Mr.
President.
When she is the Secretary of State, she was supposed to play good cop a little bit and give him a little wiggle room, and she didn't.
And everybody knew why.
Same reason she bombed Libya.
She kind of strut her stuff and prove how tough she is.
But here's the thing about it.
I don't think that other parts of knowledge in her brain can ever override that.
I think that, for example, oh, this is the one I was working to, sorry.
When General Breedlove's emails were hacked, could have been the Russians, I don't know, I don't care, but I'm glad whoever did it, did it.
And they published these emails, and Breedlove was talking about trying to end-run Obama and escalate the war in Ukraine, hell or high water.
Even tried to get the Pakistanis to ship in some shoulder-fired missiles.
And they went, why aren't we hearing this from the White House?
I don't know.
And double-checked, and man, this was a problem.
And I'm thinking that if it had been Hillary Clinton and not Barack Obama, that she would have done whatever Breedlove said.
And it would have been all a matter of the social psychology of her being her and him being him, and in the roles that they're playing, rather than, you know, hard thinking, or words on paper, or real doctrines about what exactly are the red lines in Ukraine, and how to make sure to avoid a thermonuclear war, for example, as something important.
I think to her, pleasing the men who are looking at her for a decision would have been the highest priority in a way that Obama at least eventually learned how to face these men down sometimes.
You know what I mean?
But I just think she would be, well, like Donald Trump, just a puppet on their strings.
But if you look at Donald Trump now telling Mattis, you decide, you can have as many troops as you want, because now the decision is up to you.
I think that she would have been, just like that, maybe even worse, you know?
With Trump, it's more cowardice.
With her, it's more, jeez, I sure do want to please you, General Mattis, you know?
I don't know about her psychology about that.
I mean, she's more than just the president's wife.
She's certainly an accomplished, very intelligent, knowledgeable person.
I don't know why she takes the positions she does, but they're dangerous, there's no doubt about it.
And yes, I think you were referring to that New York Times Magazine article about wanting a beer and this type of toughness.
She's a hawk.
You know, she was a Goldwater girl, don't forget.
So I think this is part of her politics from way back.
I don't know how much of it has to do with what you were saying about her wanting to be one of the men or proving to the men, but I don't think that's really important necessarily.
No, but she had to be opposed because of the policies that she had and how dangerous they were.
I think that's really the troubling thing.
And even Gates, by the way, tried to stop her in Libya.
The Washington Times did a piece that got completely ignored based on some leaked tapes in which Gates opened up a back-channel communication to Gaddafi to see if he could diffuse this thing through Gaddafi's son.
So NATO would not intervene.
So she was hell-bent on that, and Obama let her have that one.
But he stopped her in Syria a couple of times.
She wanted definitely to get deeply involved in Syria, directly involved against and overthrow Assad.
And I hardly doubt that if she'd been elected that she would not be working to overthrow Assad right now and ratcheting up tensions with Russia.
What's wrong with better, as Trump himself said, and I hate to be put in a position I have to defend Trump here, but what was wrong with him saying we have good relations with Russia is a good thing?
This doesn't defend everything Russia does internally and all that.
We're talking about avoiding conflict, and there's no way the Middle East, for example, could be resolved without Russia and the U.S. cooperating in Syria and elsewhere, in particular putting their clients or Iran and Saudi Arabia together in a room and work out some kind of accommodation, which would solve so many of the problems here in the Middle East where I am, if those two countries quit it.
Because that is the source of the trouble in Bahrain, in Syria, in Yemen, obviously, and in Lebanon, and it has to be accommodation.
It's the only way to solve this thing, to put a damper on the sectarianism, which is widespread.
I hear people here in the street, everywhere I talk, they're very sectarian, and it's really troubling to me.
Otherwise, very nice people, suddenly, when you mention Shia, they would go crazy, they'd become monsters.
So this thing has to be, instead the U.S. is getting down dirty with one of the sides, with the Sunni side, doesn't matter which side, getting on either side, not acting like a big power, like a great power, to use diplomacy to try to resolve these issues.
And I'm afraid Trump is making a big mistake supporting Saudi Arabia against Qatar right now.
But you were talking about Trump, you know, what he says is becoming irrelevant.
You have to listen to Mattis and McMaster, because his tweets are now completely contradictory to the State Department and the Defense Department on the Qatar crisis.
And you have to ignore what he says.
I was surprised that Merkel, a few weeks ago, got so upset with the things that he said at that NATO summit.
She should know.
And I think she was doing it for her own domestic political reasons, because she has an election coming up, and Trump's unpopular.
But the fact is, Trump's becoming more and more irrelevant.
He's turning it all over, yes, to the generals.
And you've got to hope that these guys are not as aggressive as Hillary Clinton would have been.
But you're right.
If she were in power, she wouldn't be turning it over to them.
She'd be leading them into battle, it looks like, based on everything we know about her.
She has a track record.
Trump doesn't.
We didn't know what he was going to do.
All right, wait, I've got to save myself from my horrible sexism here.
So what I really kind of meant to should have said was, it's always like this for Democrats.
It's like this for Obama, too.
It wasn't because he was black.
It's because he was a Democrat.
And so and everybody knows that a Democrat means weak, like Jimmy Carter or whatever.
And Republican means tough, like Ronald Reagan.
This is the way people think in politics.
And I think if I got to be sexist about it, the thing is, it's just it's even more so for her.
Maybe it's more so for Obama because he was black.
And that made people think that he was some kind of Saul Alinsky, black radical rather than a centrist.
So he had to, you know, be extra tough guy in Afghanistan, for example.
I think the same kind of thing with her that not just is she a Democrat, but also she's a woman.
So she has to prove not even necessarily whether she believes it or not.
But just politically speaking, she's got to not be confused for weak.
You know, and that was why, you know, in that New York Times profile of her about Libya and the bank shot into Syria and everything she's saying, we have everything's got to be muscular.
Come on, guys.
It's got to be muscular.
Come on.
We'll get Anne-Marie Slaughter to write up a thing about our muscular foreign policy.
And also is what whatever she thinks aside.
The politics of it are that Democrats are weak and women are even weaker than that.
And so she's got to be extra macho kind of thing.
I think we have.
But the opposite of that, of course, is Trump, which Mr. Six and a half foot tall billionaire tycoon alpha monkey.
He could be totally for peace.
He could just say, you know what?
I'm tough enough to fight in Afghanistan, but I'm too smart to fight in Afghanistan.
How do you like that?
And pull the troops out.
He can make peace with Assad, make peace with Putin, make peace with the Ayatollah Khamenei and go, look, I'm Richard Nixon here.
I'm doing this because I'm smart.
I'm doing this because it's good for America.
And what are you going to do?
Call me a Democrat.
I'm not right.
No, no, that's possible.
I hope he does that.
He doesn't, though.
I don't think he understands the dynamic.
I actually think he has some pretty good instincts, but I don't think he understands the dynamics of of how well he could get away with that, with the counterintuitive there, being the macho guy for peace instead of.
You're probably right.
You're probably right.
I don't think he understands a lot of things.
And so instead he takes the Obama policy, which is whatever you say, Mr. Secretary.
Right.
Well, they've been making his life hell, too, with these leaks and all that and distracting him.
But let's see.
Maybe you'll be able to stand up to these guys.
But it doesn't look good.
No.
Yeah.
I mean, Wall Street Journal last night, I'm sure you saw the he's delegated the Afghanistan trip number decision to Mattis.
Yeah.
So.
Yeah.
Might be delegating a lot more to them, too, not just maybe, you know, what military action they could take.
Yeah.
Like, how involved was he in that Yemen strike, the one that went bad?
The Yemen raid.
Mm hmm.
You know, we don't really know how much he signed off on it, I guess.
But was he?
How involved was he in that?
Yeah.
He's loosened the rules of engagement for Somalia as well.
They've been hitting the Al-Shabaab in Somalia.
So yeah.
I mean, anyways.
But, you know, Scott, he's being pushed now to be tough on Russia to put down this thing.
And that's scary, too, in itself.
So he has to prove himself there.
You know, that's dangerous.
That really bothers me, too, because I think, yeah, never mind the poor Somalis.
I mean, just on the Russia thing, it seems like he has all the incentive in the world, you know, politically speaking.
And it seems like here he has the wherewithal.
This is a Donald Trump art of the deal moment where it seems like he only has one obvious move to make, and that is invite Putin to D.C. and have a big nuclear disarmament deal and just shove it down the throat of the haters and just take this thing by the horns, man.
You want to call me a traitor, huh?
Well, here's my massive new H-bomb disarmament deal.
How do you like that?
And just stick it to him, because otherwise they're just burying him under a ton of bricks here with this nonsense.
As you're saying, he's he's completely under siege.
What else is he going to tell these guys other than to do what they want when he's just being completely befuddled and attacked from all directions over this bogus Russian nonsense, you know?
Yeah.
I mean, it seems like that isn't that what Donald Trump would do?
Some kind of art of the deal type thing where he goes, yeah, you know what?
I do like Putin personally, too.
I looked into his soul and we're friends now, just like George W. Bush.
And just you know what I mean?
Go for it.
Why not?
I don't get it.
He I mean, like you say, they're beating his ass every day on this.
You know, I don't know.
Maybe I'm dreaming about the H-bombs, but they could do something, right?
They could come up with some kind of deal to make.
You know, we'll pull our troops out of the Baltics if you'll do whatever, pull your missiles out of Kaliningrad.
Yeah, no, it would be great, but I'm not holding my breath.
Yeah, I guess not.
That was kind of the one thing I was a little bit hopeful on.
And as we talked about a year ago, right, it happens to be the single most important issue in the whole world.
By a million miles, there's no comparison.
America and Russia must get along.
That's it.
I mean, really, if they start committing genocide in Mongolia because they want to steal a bunch of gold or something, then they're going to need a real stern talking to.
But still, we can't do anything about it, right?
What can we do about it?
They can destroy our entire civilization.
Yeah, well, liberal media doesn't see that as the most important story.
They're playing with fire by stoking these tensions with Moscow unnecessarily.
Did you see the clip of Stephen Colbert attacking Oliver Stone?
No, no, I didn't.
So it's just all I hadn't even seen any of the interviews yet.
And you know, Oliver Stone isn't perfect or whatever.
But I mean, clearly he's Stephen Colbert just completely took him to task for daring to provide a platform for the American people to hear what this guy's got to say.
I mean, what if he what if Putin is the most wily manipulator in the world?
So what?
That's not going to work on us.
And besides, we have Stephen Colbert to translate for us and to tell us what it all means the next night.
Why should we be afraid to even hear Putin at all?
Why should we hate Oliver Stone for daring to be such a sycophant as to sit at the table and let the man talk without shouting him down?
You know, I don't even have the decency to treat you that way.
So you're my friend, right?
You're absolutely right.
It's like any criticism of their system that they're doing very well in, you know, and this is all about lifestyle and about money and power.
And you've got that.
And if anyone tries to criticize how you got it or in any way threaten it, they've got to be stopped.
And you go, you cannot put in your own newspapers owned by the big corporations who are doing very well, who are running things.
You can't put stuff in there critical of American foreign policy, too critical.
Not mistakes that they made, but serious problems.
And they got away with the invasion of Iraq because the media helped them get away with it, etc.
So you have to go somewhere.
A lot of people go to Russia media for that because they give a platform.
OK, doesn't mean we were saying good things about Russia.
It's about criticizing U.S. foreign policy.
And that then you become, you are just absolutely persona non grata.
And that's Oliver Stone right now.
He's gone to Russia and he's letting Putin speak.
What about the other side of the story?
It's journalism 101.
They never print Russia's positions on various situations like Syria.
Putin has laid out exactly what Russia is trying to do.
You may not agree with it.
You may think he's lying, but you should print it.
You have to report that side of the story.
International reporting is so complex and people just, nations are only driven by interests that you need to understand the motives behind these interests without taking sides, without moralizing, because nobody is pretty good in international affairs.
Everybody's devil.
Some are bigger than others.
Nations are just pursuing their interests.
So if you don't report what Iran is saying about why they're doing something, if you don't report what Russia is saying about why they're doing something, you will never understand why they're doing it.
You will only accept the American explanation of it.
It's classic Orientalism.
You give no voice to those people.
You dehumanize whole nations like Russia.
It becomes easier to go to war with them because you don't know these people.
And the American media and American leaders can explain to us, the American people, what Russia is doing, rather than allowing Russia to have a voice for what they're doing, allowing the Palestinians to have a voice about why they're doing what they're doing, or the Iranians.
This is forbidden in the American media to give any real space.
You know, Saddam says he had no WMD, was one line in a 1,500-word New York Times article leading up to the 2003 invasion.
Don't give the other side of the story.
All of us don't is trying to do here, and I haven't seen any of it, and I won't be able to hear overseas for a while, get access to it.
But he's giving a platform to a guy who's very much in the news, right?
What is wrong with that?
It doesn't, like you said, is he going to be speaking every word he says?
He'll mesmerize everyone, and we won't be able to be critical about what Vladimir Putin says?
Of course not.
But listen to what Russia has to say, the Russian leader.
What are they afraid of?
They're afraid of him saying some true things, maybe.
Like the U.S. was behind Al-Qaeda in helping the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, which apparently he said in the first interview.
That's a fact.
The U.S. support for extremist groups around the world, we've talked about it before on your show, everybody who has a half a brain knows this is the case.
So they don't want him to say it, because the American press will not ever report this.
They will always shut that part out.
The Defense Intelligence Agency document that showed the U.S., Turkey, and the Gulf were supporting the South, East, and Syria, that could become the Islamic State in two years and then did, is never published.
So you can't have Vladimir Putin talking, and the guy who's letting him talk is Oliver Stone.
So you've got to crush him.
You've got to crush anybody who wants to report that.
And the only place you can go that can say that is on Russian media sometime, or Iranian media.
And then you're condemned for going on their media, and then you're just one of their puppets.
You're a propagandist for them.
Stone is a propagandist, because he's allowing, he's doing the job that American journalists are not doing, the other half of the job, which is to report the other half of the story.
Sorry.
You got me going now.
Good.
Yeah, no, I mean, it's making me look better, because I was supposed to be asking you questions instead of just yelling at you the whole time.
But I appreciate your forbearance.
Yeah, I was reading Gilbert Doctorow at ConsortiumNews.com, and apparently they ran the entire Megyn Kelly interview, and then you can watch them back to back next to each other.
And apparently there's at least one massive edit where Megyn Kelly says, oh, you know, this and that, criticizing Russian democracy.
And he says, well, you know, it's not perfect, but we're working on it.
And then he goes on for a few paragraphs about some things about Russia and some things about America, and all that got cut out.
And then they end with him, you know, saying some platitude.
And in other words, they constructed it to look like he basically had nothing to say to her criticism, other than, oh, gee, abra, abra, abra, when in fact, he had this entire substantive thing where he brought up, you know, we don't, you know, look at the, I think one of the examples was the violent police action to break up the Occupy movements all across America.
We don't have anything analogous to that.
We don't have any.
We don't do that.
You know, you guys have your own problems, this, that, the other thing, and all of that landed on the cutting room floor.
Well, that's what you do when you have an agenda and corporate media in America has an agenda.
They're not doing real journalism, which is to just explain all the different sides and give different aspects of a story.
It's funny because people understand the complexity of it.
In a way.
It's a surprise.
Right.
But on the other hand, it's kind of a surprise because this is the future where we can watch both versions.
You know what I mean?
It's not.
Yeah.
It's not rather Jennings and Brokaw anymore.
And yet they still act like they have that narrow control over the filters when they really don't.
Right.
They do.
Well, it's taken a long time for them to understand this.
This is not going to be gradual.
They're in denial about a lot of that.
They may have the control financially of the ownership of most of the big media, but they're losing the control of the message.
There's no question about that.
And they're becoming more and more under pressure because of that.
I think they understand that.
But they've become more of an agenda driven media, I think, in the last few years than they were previously.
And everything is sinking down to the bottom, frankly, because a lot of the alternative media or social media is not something you can necessarily believe in either.
So we are really in a mess when it comes to information right now.
But you're right.
You could see both.
Then you make up your own mind there.
You could make up your own mind.
You want the raw material.
This is what WikiLeaks does, incidentally, just present the raw materials and you read it and you could see.
And if you need any help understanding it, you can read my book, which annotates, annotates it.
That's what I was going to say.
Yeah.
And back to the beginning.
And what's important here with a foreword by Julian Assange introduced and annotated by our friend Joe Lauria.
It's how I lost by Hillary Clinton.
And no, it's not a book of excuses blaming Putin.
It's just her speeches, her emails, her associates and their own words, block quote after block quote after block quote, explaining just what horrible people they are and reminding you why you didn't support them last year.
And a good one.
A fun one.
I bet.
Especially for college students.
Thank you, Joe, for coming back on my show, man.
Thank you very much and all the best to you.
All right, you guys.
That is the great Joe Lauria.
And, you know, you should sign up for the RSS feed because I'm going to interview him again in just a few days or so, if I can, about Iraq War Three, which is still raging right now in Mosul and moving, of course, into Raqqa in eastern Syria.
And he's a real expert on all of that as well, of course, based out of Iraqi Kurdistan now.
The great Joe Lauria, formerly with The Wall Street Journal, United Nations reporter for many years.
And this book is really great.
It's really well done.
It's O.R. books, the same guys that published Patrick Coburn's books these days.
How I Lost by Hillary Clinton, introduced and annotated by Joe Lauria and again with a forward by WikiLeaks' Julian Assange.
I'm Scott Horton.
You can check out the full archives at ScottHorton.org and LibertarianInstitute.org, of course, and Twitter.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Thanks, you guys.
Hey, all.
Scott here.
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